In recent years, there have been noticeable image quality improvements in silver halide multiple-layered color photographic light-sensitive materials.
Specifically, with respect to recently developed color photographic light-sensitive materials, all of the three major factors of image quality, i.e., graininess, sharpness and color reproduction have reached a fair level. For example, color prints and slide photographs obtained by users in ordinary color photography are not said to be significantly unsatisfactory.
However, with respect to one of the three factors, namely color reproducibility, much remains unsatisfactory as to hue reproduction, though there have been improvements in color purity. For example, blue-green and yellow-green colors are sometimes reproduced into colors by far different from the original color, which may disappoint the user.
The major factors associated with color reproduction include interlayer interimage effect (interimage effect) and spectral sensitivity distribution.
With respect to the interimage effect, the following is known. It is known that a compound which couples with the oxidation product of the color developing agent to form a development inhibitor or precursor thereof is added to a silver halide multiple-layered color photographic light-sensitive material, so that an interimage effect and hence improvement in color reproduction is obtained by retarding the development of other coloring layers with the development inhibitor released from this DIR compound.
Also, in the case of color negative films, it is possible to obtain an effect similar to the interimage effect by using a colored coupler in an amount more than the amount to compensate the undesirable absorption.
These techniques have contributed to improvements in color reproduction, especially color purity. Recently commonly used compounds called diffusible DIR, inhibitors or inhibitor precursor released from which has high diffusibility, have contributed to improvements in color purity significantly. However, the interimage effect is difficult to control with respect to its effective direction, and is faulty in that it causes a hue change, though it improves color purity. Control of interimage effective direction is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,725,529.
However, when using a large amount of a colored coupler, it becomes very difficult to make a proper judgment for color and density correction at the time of printing because the minimum film density increases, which may often result in print color quality degradation.
On the other hand, with respect to spectral sensitivity, U.S. Pat. No. 3,672,898 discloses an appropriate spectral sensitivity distribution to mitigate color reproduction variation among light sources used in taking pictures.
However, this does not provide any means of improving the poor hue reproduction described above.
Generally speaking, intermediate colors such as blue-green and yellow-green can be exactly reproduced by broadening the wavelength band in which the spectral sensitivity distributions of the blue-, green- and red-sensitive layers overlap, but this leads to color purity degradation inevitably. It is therefore necessary to carefully design a well-balanced combination of spectral sensitivity distribution and interimage effect to obtain improved hue reproduction without degrading color purity. For example, in Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection No. 34541/1986, which also discloses a method based on a combination of spectral sensitivity distribution and interimage effect, an attempt is made to improve hue reproduction for colors which are difficult to reproduce using color films, and it appears effective to some extent. In a typical example of this method, it is intended to obtain an interimage effect not only from the blue-, green- and red-sensitive layers as conventional but also from a layer other than the conventional color-sensitive layers.
This method appears to be effective to some extent in improving hue reproduction for some colors. However, to ensure the interimage effect, an interimage effect ensuring layer and another kind of light-sensitive silver halide are needed in addition to the essential blue-, green- and red-sensitive layers. In addition, increases in the amount of silver coated and the number of production processes pose a problem of high production cost.